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On July 18-19th, the Moyo Open - Radek Nechanicky Memorial took place in Pardubice, Czechia, with a bit more than 60 players. This tournament was part of the Grand Prix Circuit 2026 as a Bonus C Level, bringing points to qualify to the Final event next January. Undefeated, Mateusz Surma 4p claimed the victory.
Jana Hricova, tournament organiser, shares with us impressions from the tournament.
It was already the 25th edition of the tournament this year, celebrating the 25 years of co-operation with the Czech Open Festival of chess and games! In the past, the event was also part of the Pandanet Go European Cup.
Although the tournament traditionally has a fixed date in the second half of July – due to being part of the Czech Open Festival-, just a week before the EGC, it has found its place among strong players. Some of them take it as “warm up” before the EGC. On the other hand, maybe due to the holidays period, the overall number of players, especially in the last years, is not exceptionally big. Therefore, we decided to support not only top players, but successful players of all ranks and we significantly increased the prize pool.
Maybe it works, we will see in next years how it will continue.
This year tournament can be safely marked as a tournament of rising stars! It was already pointed out how young strong promising players surprised the older strong matadors.
The first round is usually considered as not so interesting, because there is a rule that strong players are paired against weak players in the top group (split and fold system). Here, there was a top group of 12 players, thus 6 games among the strongest players and the result of “stronger” against “weaker” was exactly 3-3: Bartik Dach (5d) defeated Mingriu Zhang (6d), Jason Qian (5d) defeated Lothar Spiegel (6d) and especially Jan Komin (4d) defeated Tianyi Fu (6d) !
And that was not all. Jason defeated also Lukas Podpera 7d in the next round, and Jan and Bartik defeated Tianyi!
Jan Komin was promoted to 5 dan after this tournament, congratulations! Not so bad in the age of 15.
Mateusz Surma (B) vs Jan Komin (W). B+R
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Bartik Dach (B) vs Yuanzhen Li (W). W+R
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Mingrui Zhang (B) vs Jason Qian (W). W+9.5
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Eventually, the tournament was won by Mateusz Surma 4p, undefeated.
🥈 🇬🇧 Yuanzhen Li 7d, losing to Mateusz
🥉 🇬🇧 Jason Qian 5d, losing to Mateusz and Yuanzhen
🏅 🇨🇿 Lukas Podpera 7d, losing to Jason and Mateusz
🏅 🇨🇿 Jan Komin 4d, losing to Mateusz and Yuanzhen
🏅 🇨🇿 Bartik Dach 5d, losing to Yuanzhen and Lukas
Well, that young top players fought very well in this tournament was noticed already during the event. But they were not alone. There were just two players, besides the winner Mateusz Surma 4p, who won all 5 games: Anuservon Kalandarov, 11 years old boy who reached 15 kyu thanks to this achievement, and 15 years old Matous Babka who was promoted to 1 kyu after the event.
There were also 3 players outside the top group with 4 wins, one of them is Martin Podpera, the 9 years old young brother of Lukas. Especially among DDK (double digit kyu), all prizes went to teens players.
They were quite a lot of young players and they played really very well.
Let’s hope they will keep playing go!
As for next year, see you on the 17-18th of July!
A special thanks to Andrii Kravets 3p and Benjamin Dréan-Guénaïzia 1p for reviewing live the top boards from round 2! You can find a replay on the EGF Youtube channel!